Is Trump Walking Back His Promise To Pull Out Of The Paris Climate Agreement?

Tuesday, Mr. Trump went to the NY Times building to talk with the DNC leadership, er, reporters and stuff, and had this to say

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, opinion columnist: Mr. President-elect, can I ask a question? One of the issues that you actually were very careful not to speak about during the campaign, and haven’t spoken about yet, is one very near and dear to my heart, the whole issue of climate change, the Paris agreement, how you’ll approach it. You own some of the most beautiful links golf courses in the world …

TRUMP: [laughing] I read your article. Some will be even better because actually like Doral is a little bit off … so it’ll be perfect. [inaudible] He doesn’t say that. He just says that the ones that are near the water will be gone, but Doral will be in great shape.

FRIEDMAN: But it’s really important to me, and I think to a lot of our readers, to know where you’re going to go with this. I don’t think anyone objects to, you know, doing all forms of energy. But are you going to take America out of the world’s lead of confronting climate change?

TRUMP: I’m looking at it very closely, Tom. I’ll tell you what. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. It’s one issue that’s interesting because there are few things where there’s more division than climate change. You don’t tend to hear this, but there are people on the other side of that issue who are, think, don’t even …

Now, Trump has specifically promised to pull out of the Paris Climate agreement many times during the campaign. But, as Allahpundit notes

It could be that he’s just being prudential. There’s no sense binding himself to a position on a major issue, campaign promise or no, before he’s been fully briefed and his cabinet’s debated it. Same goes for the Iran nuclear deal, which he’s also promised to abandon in the past buthas been coy about lately. He’s going to take his time before committing to a major unilateral move, particularly one that’ll anger American allies. Another possibility: The guy loves good press and enjoys pleasing his audience, and he knows what an audience of New York Times editors wants to hear about climate change. He couldn’t resist pandering to them. Put him back in front of an arena of 10,000 screaming fans and he’ll say something different.

The thing here is that I read that bit as being about not just rethinking the Paris agreement, but Hotcoldwetdry altogether. Is he playing coy or moderating his position? If he moderates on this, he’ll lose quite a bit of capital with the people who voted for him. He also told Michael Sheer, NY Times White House correspondent, that he would look at it, meaning the Paris agreement specifically, later in the meeting.

We also supposedly get this, but, it’s not in the transcript that I can find

Does Trump think human activity is linked to climate change? “I think there is some connectivity. Some, something. It depends on how much.”

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) November 22, 2016

Despite his talk about hoaxes from China, I have no problem with this. I’ve written tons of times that Mankind does play a small part. We’ll soon find out what Trump really meant and what he didn’t. Will he solidify my election season belief that he wasn’t to be trusted, or will he do the majority of things he promised?

Crossed at Right Wing News.